


coma baby

by kashxy



Series: will i ever stop writing angst? (no) [15]
Category: Spider-Man: Homecoming
Genre: Brain Damage, Depression, Hospital, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Non Graphic Suicide Mention, Peter Parker Whump, Self Harm Scars, Severe Mental Issues, Soft Gore, Suicide Attempt, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:55:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25338709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kashxy/pseuds/kashxy
Summary: the kid in the bed wasn’t just peter parker, the kid from queens; he was peter parker, top model student of mit, too smart for his own good. he was spider-man.tony knows in his heart that peter’ll never be spider-man again, but he likes to imagine it.
Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: will i ever stop writing angst? (no) [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1361449
Comments: 9
Kudos: 75





	coma baby

**Author's Note:**

> hi. this work is very detailed in describing the aftermath of a suicide and how life would be should a character be in a vegetative state. please proceed with caution should this act as a trigger. :)

peter’s heart monitor beeps slowly.

tony doesn’t know how quickly a heart monitor is supposed to beep, but he’s sure this is too slow.

he sighs and leans forward in the chair, his eyes ghosting over peter’s fragile state.

he’s lying straight, his fingers bandaged at his sides. his neck is still in that brace, his cheek bruised and swollen. he looks as tiny here as he did when they first met, a scrawny fourteen year old child with dreams bigger than his heart. he looks a lot smaller here than he did when tony found him on the road, his skull practically cracked in half.

he jolts and pushes the heels of his palms into his eyes, whispering to himself. the image is something he can’t think about without feeling the need to throw up.

but of course, it’s here now, and all he can see is peter’s twisted body, his knee at an unnatural angle, pushing through the skin, his face bloodied and scarred with tarmac. his head had been bleeding, almost pouring from an open wound so it made a halo around his soft hair. he remembers the bridge, the height of it, the barely there pulse, the mangled face.

tony barely manages to grab peter’s sick bowl before he’s throwing up into it, hacking and painful because there’s nothing in his stomach to be rid of. it’s not like peter’ll be awake any time soon to use it.

he shakes his head and spits out the rest of the bile into the bowl.

peter hasn’t moved for three days. he didn’t move when the paramedics scooped his barely there body from the tarmac of the road. he didn’t move when they hooked him up to a thousand different wires, shooting medicine up his veins even when tony screamed because peter was scared of needles. he didn’t move the doctors told tony he’d probably never walk again if he survived the night.

and he did, barely. they scraped by the first night with only one crash, peter’s lifeless body still and even without any dips in the monitor. tony had watched his eyes for a long time and concluded that there was no fluttering - he must have been in some black, dream-like state, too far away to feel the pain he must have felt when he fell fifty feet and smacked into the road below.

tony doesn’t even want to think of the pain he must have felt beforehand because what kid, what sixteen year old _child_ would feel compelled to leap from a bridge because the pain he felt was too great? he _can’t_ think about it, because if he does he might drive himself crazy thinking of all the ways he can protect peter from that happening again.

not that it seems likely peter will ever get the chance to try to kill himself again. the doctors said that if he ever came out of the coma, he’d probably be in such an incapacitated state that he wouldn’t even be able to feed himself. granted, they’d given him a fairly high chance of survival with minimal damage, but even that percentage was too low. 

the thought makes tony sick. the kid in the bed wasn’t just peter parker, the kid from queens; he was peter parker, top model student of mit, too smart for his own good. he was _spider-man_. 

tony knows in his heart that peter’ll never be spider-man again, but he likes to imagine it.

the monitor beeps a little faster.

tony jumps straight to his feet, ignoring the full sick bowl on the floor near his feet. he’s at peter’s bedside in a second, his fingers ghosting somewhere over the kid’s forearm because he’s too afraid to touch the scars littering his porcelain skin.

_why hadn’t he noticed? **how** hadn’t he noticed?_

“peter?” he says, voice too hopeful for something that may have not even been real. “peter, hey, it’s tony. come on, kid, please wake up.”

there’s no movement behind peter’s eyelids, but if tony’s stares hard enough, he can almost see those big hazel eyes staring up at him, holding so much love the world would’ve have burned around him and he’d still be a safe spot.

he stays there for a few minutes, hand pressed against peter’s cheek. he hopes that somewhere deep down he can feel him, that he can feel the warmth of tony’s hand against his cheek and the salty tears dripping on his hospital gown and that he knows that maybe it’s okay if he lets go.

because tony’s not stupid. he knows how much pain peter’s in, know’s how much pain he will be in when he wakes up, but the doctors had given him a higher chance of waking from the coma than they had done any other suicide victim. the thought makes his skin crawl. it’s the spider dna, he tells himself, but he wonders if it’s a curse more than it is a blessing sometimes.

he tries to imagine a world where peter parker just sits in a wheelchair, hair messy and uncomfortable because he can’t move to style it himself. he tries to imagine a world where his lab isn’t full of laughter and big hazel eyes and lost voicemails about churros and constant star wars references.

he can’t do it. he can’t cope.

and then he looks at peter lying there, at his horrifyingly still form, at his innocent face all scarred and swollen and bruised and suddenly he remembers that it’s not about whether he can cope.

it’s got to be about peter, about the pain he felt before the attempt, about the blades they found in his pocket, about the notes and about the coma and about the fact that if he wakes up there’s a thirty seventy chance he’ll never speak or walk again.

the bile rises again in tony’s throat, but he swallows it down.

they’d given him a high chance of waking, maybe a ten percent of being able bodied again. tony tries to stay hopeful, to hold onto the little glimmer that his spider healing will up that chance, just like bruce had said, but he tries not to think about it too much.

he’s afraid of cursing it, of wishing so much for his recovery that it inevitably doesn’t happen. he’s so used to the idea of things crumbling underneath his fingertips that he hadn’t even touched peter’s body after he’d been wheeled away on the stretcher.

he’d gotten there first. of course he had, because peter hadn’t been in his suit all night and then when tony inevitably got worried and tracked him using heat sensors (which may have been a little psycho, but for good reason) and saw his kid pacing along a bridge overhanging a large road, he’d used every last bit of power in the suit that he could muster up.

in fact, he didn’t even have enough juice to race to the hospital, so he and happy drove, never slowing past seventy miles an hour, because they weren’t allowed to ride in the ambulance because peter was crashing crashing crashing every minute.

he doesn’t remember bringing the kid back to life, even though he knows he did. they told him as much.

“he wouldn’t be alive without you, mr. stark.” they’d said. 

tony’s a trained superhero, and friday had walked him through every step, so he knew cpr off by heart and could do it with his eyes closed. but when it came to peter it was weak, sloppy, so clumsy that friday took control of the suit and peeled it away from his shaking body, taking control of his hands and doing it in a calculated way.

another jump.

it can’t be his imagination. bruce had warned him about the side effects, the trauma, the nightmares, the hallucinations. tony hadn’t slept for over seventy two hours, so the idea of it being delusional is quickly becoming prominent.

“peter?” he says again, tired and weak and whispered. “kid please wake up. please.”

of course, peter doesn’t answer, but he tries nonetheless.

his head hurts. he’s not sure if it’s dehydration or sleep deprivation but he turns to the meds he’d stacked on peter’s bedside table and downs four without looking. he’s not sure how he’ll get over this.

how will he cope? ever since may died, peter had been living with them, but it had already been almost two years. tony had a duty of care and he didn’t mind it; in fact, he loved taking care of peter like he was his own, often stopping just to stare at him and admire the fact that he was strong and happy and healthy and tony managed to feed him properly every day even though he could never feed himself.

peter kept him grounded, like the best little stress ball because he’d hold a hand over tony’s when he was getting anxious and use his super strength to press down, creating a weight that was hard to ignore even in hyperventilation. oftentimes, on the days they were both too traumatised to function, they’d sit on the sofa and order chinese. peter would get the sweet and sour chicken and egg fried rice. tony tries to imagine his kid being tube fed for the next eighty years, but he can’t.

and he knows peter’s not in it by himself, that tony’ll abandon each and every ongoing project to focus on making peter’s new life easy. he’d set himself on wheelchair upgrades, new implants to help his brain function, everything he could possibly think of and be done with everything else. nothing mattered if peter was in the question.

he thinks about peter, lying on the sofa on his phone, his pale scars on display without any judgement at all. he thinks about the gentleness he’d taken around peter when the trauma got too much. he thinks about everything he did right and tries to imagine all the ways he was wrong.

sure, sometimes he got preoccupied with work, but he always made it up to peter when he could. he wasn’t the best carer in the world, but he tried his absolute heart out, and peter never showed any signs of wanting to do...this.

the cuts have been stitched, deep, horizontal lines running from his forearm to his wrist. as disgusting as it sounds, tony would rather stare at those horrid self harm cuts than look at peter’s mangled right arm, or his swollen face, or his almost broken neck.

he thinks of the best possible scenario, the one in which peter’s brain regains its ability to function somewhat normally, and cringes. even then, he’ll have a broken arm, two broken legs, years of rehabilitation, at least four months inpatient and constant suicide watch. he feels sick again, but the bowl’s full, so he swallows it down and tries to breathe through his mouth.

he knows the best possible scenario is still better than the worst. he doesn’t even want to think about what he considers the worst, whether it’s peter dead or peter so vegetative that he can’t move his own fingers. the thought gets lost along with the billion other things running through his mind, so at least he doesn’t have to think about it.

“where are you, pete?” he mumbles, rubbing a thumb along the back of the kid’s hand. he sits back down again, too nauseous to stand. “what happened to you?”

and then peter’s heart monitor jumps again and, okay, it’s really not his imagination this time.

“nurse!” he shouts, because the pulse is getting stronger on the monitor and peter looks like the life’s coming back into him, and tony can’t even look away for a second to notice medical professionals piling in behind him.

“what happened?” one asks, but he can’t care enough to see who.

“his monitor.” he says, and points to the damn thing. “it’s jumping. faster.”

the nurse hums and gets to work, fumbling about the wires and it’s then that tony remembers that peter didn’t have a solid chance of returning, that his chance of survival was only slightly higher than usual. he hadn’t even thought about the idea of peter never waking up from the coma, but now he is and his eyelashes are fluttering and he’s so amazing and tony loves him so much, more than anything in this whole goddamn world.

“the prodigal son returns.” tony whispers, tears in his eyes, laughing because peter had given himself the nickname after joking about one of tony’s suits. he remembers it fondly, not able to touch peter but watching as his eyes begin to open, and he’s so so happy that he doesn’t even think about the possibility of peter not being able to him i love you back.

“he’s waking up.”


End file.
